I live in an old house with a laundry room that was a much later addition. The laundry room is pretty small, and the roof for it is completely independent of the roof for the rest of the house. Recently, the roof started leaking, and I saw that the planks that had been used as decking had become pretty badly rotted.

This past weekend, I went up on the roof and tore off the old decking, with the intention of replacing it with plywood, and found a nasty surprise. The rafters are also pretty well rotted. I tried to patch it, and did enough to keep the laundry room dry for now, but I wasn't happy with it the way it was. It looks bad, and I know what needs to be done.

I figure the best way to deal with this is to put up new trusses and go from there. However, it's a small laundry room, about 7'x7' maybe, so I don't need a lot of material. While I've put trusses up on houses before (worked residential construction for a short time a while back), I've never had to figure out much else but where to drive a nail.

First question is, where do I need to measure? I figure I need to measure from the top plate to the peak, and probably the width of the room, but what else? The current rafters are notched to sit directly on the plate, and I'm not real comfortable doing that myself, so I figure to add a soffet for the overhang instead. This would also reduce the steep pitch the roof currently has.

I really appreciate any and all help you guys can give me!

Tom

Ol' Luke

11-07-2006 06:19 PM

Tom:
Measure from outside to outside of the walls, decide what pitch you want and what kind of overhang. Would you be building them yourself or having them custom made?
Ol'Luke

Darylh

11-07-2006 10:46 PM

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I have built these in the past but inspection office would not pass with out a engineers stamp but truss company will make what ever you want. they will want to know the span (width of building in which the trusses are running, pitch, width of overhang.

Tomcat1066

11-11-2006 01:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ol' Luke
(Post 23098)

Tom:
Measure from outside to outside of the walls, decide what pitch you want and what kind of overhang. Would you be building them yourself or having them custom made?
Ol'Luke

Money issues make it necessary to build them myself. However, I'm not to sure about figuring out the pitch. I'll have to look into that.

Thanks.

Tom

Darylh

11-11-2006 01:38 PM

Example: 5/12 pitch would be 5 inches of rise per foot of run so if your building is 7 feet from outside of wall to outside of wall you would divide this by 2 = 3.5 multiply this by 5 inches and you get 17.5 inches of rise.

Tomcat1066

11-11-2006 04:08 PM

I probably should have said I'm not sure how to figure out the pitch of the new roof I'm planning. My goof there ;)